Nvidia has promised that its new lineup of cryptocurrency mining GPUs, called CMP for short, will not affect the supply of GeForce graphics cards for PC gamers.

That is because these cards reportedly use GPUs that do not meet the company's GeForce graphics card specifications and would otherwise not be used much in the existing lineup, the company said. [They are CMP 90HX, 50HX, 40HX, and 30HX. As you might imagine, the digits in these names roughly represent the hash rates that these cards provide when mining Ethereum, currently the most popular cryptocurrency for GPU mining.

How exactly these GPUs stack up against existing graphics cards in the GeForce lineup hints at some similarities between the two, a nod to their possible destinations in the gaming lineup. [For example, the CMP 90HX is an 86MH/s card with a 320W TDP and 10GB of memory. This is nearly identical to the RTX 3080 specifications, although the exact configuration and clock speeds may differ.

Also, the CMP line does not have the new 12-pin power connector introduced in the RTX 30 series, but instead uses one or two 8-pin power connectors.

Since these cards are intended for mining rigs, they also lack video outputs. This may mean a decrease in resale value, one of the reasons why miners prefer gaming graphics cards. For this reason, Nvidia also appears to be taking steps to weaken the mining capabilities of at least one gaming GPU.

This news comes in conjunction with a new ruling from Nvidia that, in order to prevent miners from chasing the cards and eating up available inventory, if the Ethereum mining algorithm is detected on the company's upcoming GeForce RTX 3060 which forces graphics cards to run at a lower hash rate.

Anything to get more graphics cards into the hands of gamers. Let's hope this works.